Mild spoilers for the Evercold trailer.
This is probably a small nitpick but I think it's worth at least having a conversation about. The last good trailer we got was for Endwalker. The music made sense with the themes, was coherent and matched the visuals.
Fast forward to Dawntrail and we have a not so great soundtrack with very questionable vocals midway through and it gave off a sense of dissonance, more so musically then visually. It still managed to maintain some semblance of cohesion.
Now looking at the Evercold trailers. In my opinion, the first one was perfect. The music build up was excellent, it matched extremely well with the visuals and themes presented. It had a a good start and an excellent finish and made my actually hyped for the expansion.
Today's trailer has dashed what little hope I have for Evercold, stomped on it with a boot and spat on it. The piano does NOT mesh well at all with the themes, it drowns out the slow, melodic guitar and is so incredibly jarring it's hard to listen to anything going on. It's like listening to Swan Lake while the conductor is constantly dropping pots and pans on microphone.
The cut from the very consistent and coherent tones, visuals and auditory cues to the bubbly bright, higher vocals absolutely decimates the tone they had going and basically just chucks out whatever themes they had for the same auditory trend found in the Dawntrail extended trailer.
The audio mixing is AWFUL. I get they're trying to hide the lyrics but this is not the way to do it. Everything is too loud and vying for your attention. I'm absolutely devastated...
As a fan of Soken I can't wrap my head around how this made it past Q&A. It rivals Smile as one of the most notorious soundtracks for FFXIV so far.
---Spoilers---
In terms of visuals, the juxtaposition is beyond jarring. It's like stitching in two completely different video games without rhyme or reason. And look, I'm not opposed to child characters, but it makes me uncomfortable to have the center focus of the trailer from the little Au Ra girl asking about her favourite story to....extremely cute and quirky techy Miqo'te girl in the sky. It feels so incredibly out of place and drags me right back to the Dawntrail trailer video with its incredibly weird and bizarre visual direction.
I just don't understand how the team can go from ARR through Endwalker with generally solid trailers that are engaging and that genuninely pique interest to this.....garbage.
Evercold appeared, at first, a return to form insofar as respecting the audience and yet they decided to toss that in the bin because we, apparently, can't handle a grim/dark aesthetic for an expansion called EVERCOLD. How the heck do you take that, take REAPER as the WOL class and slap a shitty piano and cherry audio for a seemingly bubbly child midway through???
Yes I'm ranting at this point but I am so genuinely disappointed. Yeah, one might say I'm overreacting and, to each their own, but I feel there is valid criticism in how CB3 has decided to present their expansions and how that COULD reflect on the game itself.
(Yes, I know a trailer is a trailer and is not indicative of the actual story and gameplay. I am also in the camp of, Endwalker's trailer was great but the story itself is extremely questionable in quality. I am also NOT a fan of Dawntrail's story which I won't get into today.)
Continue reading...
This is probably a small nitpick but I think it's worth at least having a conversation about. The last good trailer we got was for Endwalker. The music made sense with the themes, was coherent and matched the visuals.
Fast forward to Dawntrail and we have a not so great soundtrack with very questionable vocals midway through and it gave off a sense of dissonance, more so musically then visually. It still managed to maintain some semblance of cohesion.
Now looking at the Evercold trailers. In my opinion, the first one was perfect. The music build up was excellent, it matched extremely well with the visuals and themes presented. It had a a good start and an excellent finish and made my actually hyped for the expansion.
Today's trailer has dashed what little hope I have for Evercold, stomped on it with a boot and spat on it. The piano does NOT mesh well at all with the themes, it drowns out the slow, melodic guitar and is so incredibly jarring it's hard to listen to anything going on. It's like listening to Swan Lake while the conductor is constantly dropping pots and pans on microphone.
The cut from the very consistent and coherent tones, visuals and auditory cues to the bubbly bright, higher vocals absolutely decimates the tone they had going and basically just chucks out whatever themes they had for the same auditory trend found in the Dawntrail extended trailer.
The audio mixing is AWFUL. I get they're trying to hide the lyrics but this is not the way to do it. Everything is too loud and vying for your attention. I'm absolutely devastated...
As a fan of Soken I can't wrap my head around how this made it past Q&A. It rivals Smile as one of the most notorious soundtracks for FFXIV so far.
---Spoilers---
In terms of visuals, the juxtaposition is beyond jarring. It's like stitching in two completely different video games without rhyme or reason. And look, I'm not opposed to child characters, but it makes me uncomfortable to have the center focus of the trailer from the little Au Ra girl asking about her favourite story to....extremely cute and quirky techy Miqo'te girl in the sky. It feels so incredibly out of place and drags me right back to the Dawntrail trailer video with its incredibly weird and bizarre visual direction.
I just don't understand how the team can go from ARR through Endwalker with generally solid trailers that are engaging and that genuninely pique interest to this.....garbage.
Evercold appeared, at first, a return to form insofar as respecting the audience and yet they decided to toss that in the bin because we, apparently, can't handle a grim/dark aesthetic for an expansion called EVERCOLD. How the heck do you take that, take REAPER as the WOL class and slap a shitty piano and cherry audio for a seemingly bubbly child midway through???
Yes I'm ranting at this point but I am so genuinely disappointed. Yeah, one might say I'm overreacting and, to each their own, but I feel there is valid criticism in how CB3 has decided to present their expansions and how that COULD reflect on the game itself.
(Yes, I know a trailer is a trailer and is not indicative of the actual story and gameplay. I am also in the camp of, Endwalker's trailer was great but the story itself is extremely questionable in quality. I am also NOT a fan of Dawntrail's story which I won't get into today.)
Continue reading...